Breen has an eye for the telling detail, and a gift for introducing even walk-on characters with brio. One is George Hunter White, a former narcotics investigator from Pasadena who ran some of the real-world testing of LSD for the C.I.A., setting up bachelor pads in the West Village and in the Marina neighborhood of San Francisco where unsuspecting individuals could be surreptitiously dosed with the drug (in their drinks, food, or cigarettes) while agents observed and secretly recorded their behavior. Breen offers this quick, memorable sketch: “The 35-year-old White, who has been likened to ‘an extremely menacing bowling ball,’ had pale blue, Siberian husky eyes set in a gin-blossomed face, a boundless appetite for intoxicants, and a lifelong fascination with Chinese culture.”
One impression such portraits leave the reader with is that the nineteen-fifties and the early sixties were much weirder than you might imagine if you were still taking your cues from “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.” People who worked with psychedelics seem to have been especially adroit at projecting authoritative normality while conducting some very screwy and sometimes quite sinister business behind the scenes. Harold Abramson, a low-profile physician at Mt. Sinai Hospital, in New York, whose expertise was in allergies, led a life that was “outwardly conventional, a model of midcentury domesticity.” He and his wife, who had four children, “collected Japanese netsuke carvings, carefully cultivated the lawn of their palatial home in suburban Long Island, and he played bridge with their neighbors once a week.” But Abramson was also a chemical-weapons expert who fed LSD to the Siamese fighting fish he kept at his lab (as well as to willing guests at his dinner parties), and played a key role in the MK-Ultra program. Breen thinks he may have been the most influential researcher into psychedelics of the twentieth century.
And yet the late fifties and early sixties were also a kind of golden age for earnest, out-in-the-open exploration of psychedelics. Chemists at Sandoz Laboratories, in Basel, Switzerland, first synthesized an experimental compound known as lysergic acid diethylamide in 1938. By 1949, little bottles of the stuff were rolling off a Swiss assembly line, bound for labs and doctors’ offices around the world. (Officially, only licensed physicians who were engaged in research could get hold of it, but it didn’t take long for it to filter into other networks.) In a period before the development of modern antidepressants or, indeed, of many psychoactive drugs at all—boom times were on the way, starting with the first tranquillizers to come on the market, in the early sixties, but they hadn’t quite arrived yet—LSD seemed like a wonder drug, radiant with scientific promise. Aldous Huxley, in his 1954 memoir, “The Doors of Perception,” could compare psychedelics favorably to alcohol and barbiturates. “To most people,” Huxley wrote, mescaline “is almost completely innocuous.”